> I think you can basically make a case for including or excluding transwomen in women's sports depending on whether you think inclusion or fairness is most important.
A pretty wide spread of sports have allowed trans women*, and they have not dominated. If trans women did have an outsized performance in women's sports, there'd be examples to point to. I don't think you can make an evidence-based case for fairness and inclusion being at odds, given there aren't any unfair examples of inclusion to point to.
Some of the most notable examples include weightlifting and swimming. In weightlifting, probably the sport I'd expect an unfair advantage to make itself most apparent, Laurel Hubbard got a DNF in the Olympics, and did merely pretty good in several other events. Or in swimming, another sport I'd expect body proportions to have a significant impact in, Lia Thomas, who was the center of a ton of controversy, also did merely fine.
I'm not sure there are sports where trans women would have a bigger advantage than weightlifting, if such an advantage existed. And the tiny number of trans women interested in sports means that erring on the side of inclusion (if it does turn out to be an error) would also have a tiny negative impact,
* - Pedantic side note, combining "transwomen" and "ciswomen" into single words implies that we're different base nouns. It's similar to how "chinamen" is not acceptable, but generally there's nothing wrong with "Chinese men". "Trans" and "cis" are just adjectives modifying "men" or "women".
> In weightlifting, probably the sport I'd expect an unfair advantage to make itself most apparent, Laurel Hubbard got a DNF in the Olympics, and did merely pretty good in several other events.
On the contrary, Laurel Hubbard is a good example of how apparent this male physical advantage is when male athletes are allowed to compete in the female category.
Here's a chart showing ranked lifts for both men's and women's weightlifting in the World Masters Games, where Hubbard won a gold medal in the women's category in 2017: https:/i.ibb.co/WWf7CMQD/hubbard.jpg (the source of this graph is a developmental biologist who, amongst other things, studies sex differences in sport).
This shows that the set of lifts by female and male weightlifters are entirely distinct. Hubbard falls within the middle range of the male rankings and is a huge outlier compared to the female rankings.
For the Olympics, if Hubbard had been female, qualification for the competition would have been unprecedented. Hubbard was competing in the wake of an earlier elbow injury, had taken a years-long career break, and was considerably older than any female weightlifter ever to qualify for Olympic weightlifting: female weightlifters peak at around age 26 and Hubbard was 43 years old at the time.
Being male in the female category was sufficient to mitigate all the effects of older age, chronic injury, undertraining, and - compared to other males - lack of world class talent.
It's also worth noting that Hubbard came last at the Olympics due to being disqualified for improper technique, not because of being unable to physically manage the lifts.
A pretty wide spread of sports have allowed trans women*, and they have not dominated. If trans women did have an outsized performance in women's sports, there'd be examples to point to. I don't think you can make an evidence-based case for fairness and inclusion being at odds, given there aren't any unfair examples of inclusion to point to.
Some of the most notable examples include weightlifting and swimming. In weightlifting, probably the sport I'd expect an unfair advantage to make itself most apparent, Laurel Hubbard got a DNF in the Olympics, and did merely pretty good in several other events. Or in swimming, another sport I'd expect body proportions to have a significant impact in, Lia Thomas, who was the center of a ton of controversy, also did merely fine.
I'm not sure there are sports where trans women would have a bigger advantage than weightlifting, if such an advantage existed. And the tiny number of trans women interested in sports means that erring on the side of inclusion (if it does turn out to be an error) would also have a tiny negative impact,
* - Pedantic side note, combining "transwomen" and "ciswomen" into single words implies that we're different base nouns. It's similar to how "chinamen" is not acceptable, but generally there's nothing wrong with "Chinese men". "Trans" and "cis" are just adjectives modifying "men" or "women".